From Ochs and Abe to Bill and Jill

Later this year, when Bill Keller dismounts as executive editor of the New York Times and hands the reins to Jill Abramson, he’ll have been in the saddle for eight years. Is eight years—the equivalent of two full Presidential terms—a lot or a little? That depends.

By the standards of the last quarter-century, it’s a little more like a lot than a little. Max Frankel’s executive editorship also lasted eight years, Joseph Lelyveld’s seven, and Howell Raines’s, cut short by the Jayson Blair scandal, only two.

By the standards of an earlier time, though, Keller’s eight years look more like a little than a lot. What might be called the Imperial Age of the Times began in 1904, when Adolph Ochs, who had bought the paper for a song in 1896, moved its headquarters uptown from Park Row to Longacre Square, which the city obligingly renamed Times Square, and installed Carr Van Anda in what was then the top editorial post, managing editor. Van Anda ruled for twenty-two years, the first of four giants who ran the show for most of the twentieth century. The others: Edwin L. James (1932-51, nineteen years), Turner Catledge (1951-64, thirteen years), and A.M. Rosenthal (1969-86, seventeen years).

I don’t know if the job is inherently harder now than it used to be, but it is certainly more inherently stressful. Keller has had to deal with something that none of his predecessors needed to worry about: a prolonged existential crisis of the institution itself. Ten years ago, the nonexistence of the New York Times was as unimaginable a thought as the nonexistence of the Roman Catholic Church. Now that it’s all too imaginable, it’s correspondingly more horrifying—as horrifying as the (somewhat less likely) prospect of the nonexistence of the United States of America. Maybe more so: remember what Jefferson said about a government without newspapers.

Keller’s tenure has coincided with that existential crisis. It fell to him to manage an inescapable and inescapably painful downsizing, and my impression is that he handled that aspect of his job about as well as one could under the circumstances. Getting laid off is awful. But telling people they don’t have a job anymore is not a fun way to spend your day, either, and Keller has had many such days. The printed paper is physically smaller, too. The news hole is tighter. It’s harder to flood the zone, and harder still to maintain the kind of unflashy, everyday, reporter-intensive coverage that keeps the powers that be, from the precinct house to the White House, looking over their shoulders. Yet the quality and quantity of Times journalism remain unsurpassed on Planet Earth; if there has been a decline it has not been anywhere near proportional to the declines in advertising revenue, ink-on-paper circulation, and newsroom staffing. And there may not have been a decline at all, given the Times’s magnificent Web site, which keeps getting better. (Of course, that’s easy for me to say: I’m a paying newsprint subscriber, so I get to scamper right through the new twenty-articles-a-month paywall.)

I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the place to offer definitive judgments, but from the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job overall. Yes, the way that he and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., handled the aftermath of the Judith Miller/Iraq/WMD fiasco left a lot to be desired. So did the news department’s longtime willingness to call torture by its name—except when perpetrated by the American government, at which point it became “harsh interrogation techniques” that “human rights groups and some lawmakers have argued are torture.” But there were countless triumphs as well, up to and including the Times’s painstaking curating of the WikiLeaks cables.

In “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” a feature documentary that opens on June 17 (I saw a preview and was mesmerized), Keller, who has the square-jawed, silver-haired, rough-hewn handsomeness of a Western-movie frontier judge (or could he be a railroad baron?), is a thoughtful, slightly melancholy presence. (The film’s offbeat star is the paper’s media columnist, David Carr, soon to be even more of a cult figure than he is already.) In a just-posted Esquireinterview, Keller says that the filmmakers “got the ambience of the place right.” He ought to know. “Page One” is surprisingly moving, and not a little chilling, because of the way it shows the Times’s reporters and editors bravely upholding their noble craft against an ominous background of business-side global warming. No wonder Keller needs a break.

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